Painting is a real passion for Balboa Island woman
Stepping into Dottie Siemon’s Balboa Island home is a little like stepping into an art museum.
The 89-year-old, who has lived on the island for 41 years, has an inclination to apply paint to everything in her path.
Once all the wall space was filled with her acrylic paintings, she began exploring untapped surfaces in her home as potential canvases. She applied painted embellishments to tables, chairs, a grandfather clock and kitchen cabinets, both inside and out. There is hardly a space that has gone untouched.
Gail Burnham, Siemon’s next-door neighbor of 28 years, joked, “If you stand still long enough, she’ll paint you.”
Siemon’s Balboa Island lifestyle first inspired her subject matter.
“Ever since we would come down on vacation [from Northridge], I always wanted to live on the island,” she said. “It felt like home. Besides, the valley was hotter than blazes.”
After her son moved to the area, the decision was easy.
“I loved it from the day I moved in,” Siemon said. “I’ve got the sweetest neighbors on the whole street. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. You never feel lonely here, and if you do, you get yourself outside and go for a walk.”
Siemon, who took up painting when she was 65, loved to visit artist John Botz in his Laguna Beach gallery. One day he asked her why she didn’t paint. She replied, “Would you teach me?” Since he didn’t teach, he referred her to a studio in Cannery Village, where she spent a few years taking lessons.
When her hobby turned into a gainful enterprise, no one was more surprised than Siemon. She sold her paintings for 10 to 15 years at Marine Avenue store Heart of the Island.
“Dottie has the energy, creativity and spirit of a teenager,” store owner Audrey Saxon said. “I hope to be just like her when I grow up.”
In addition to her retail pursuit, Siemon’s friend Burnham, an interior designer, commissioned Siemon to do custom art projects.
“I’ve used Dottie on several jobs over the years,” Burnham said. “For example, she painted armoires decorated with animals and brightened up furniture in children’s rooms with fun designs. She even did paintings of clients’ former houses so they would remember them.”
Siemon said, “I love to do things, and when I get burned out, I try something new.”
After her husband, Bob, died six years ago, she switched from island scenes and seascapes to abstract designs using resin. “I just have to have something to do all the time,” she said.
When she’s not painting on everything from rocks to furniture, she knits, crochets and assembles puzzles.
She also volunteers her artistry on behalf of Balboa Island enhancement projects. As a way of giving back to the place she calls home, she agreed when the Balboa Island Improvement Assn. asked her to decorate street-end clay planter pots over 20 years ago. She has painted every planter with variations of yellow, pink, blue and green tulips above a sailboat scene.
“With the original clay pots, I had to raise them up with bricks so I could paint easier from my seated position on the sidewalk,” Siemon said. “Now they are plastic, and they just bring them to me as the others break.”
Summing up life on Balboa Island, Siemon said: “My favorite thing about living on the island is the people and going down to the end of my street and sitting on the bench where I can look at the boats and water. It’s very peaceful.”
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